iPhone X First Impressions

Ten decades later – in a building named after the late Apple co-founder – his successor Tim Cooktook the point to introduce the iPhone X, the phone that he and Apple believe will define the roadmap of the smartphone industry for another 10 years.

The iPhone X – pronounced iPhone 10 – represents the most radical change to Apple’s design language in the iPhone’s ten year history, as almost the entire surface of this phone is currently dominated by the display. Save for a small ‘notch’ in the top of the front edge – more on this after – the iPhone X includes pretty thin bezels on all sides, though you wouldn’t call it ‘bezel-less’. This means that the newest, most-expensive iPhone-ever seems nothing like its predecessors, although the overall design is really similar to what we have seen on a few Android phones, both with and without that notch.

In a body that’s smaller than the iPhone 7 Plus, Apple has packaged a display which at 5.8-inches is its biggest yet on a smartphone. Belatedly, Apple has caught up with the Android makers when it comes to having a screen-to-body ratio that is befitting a smartphone shipping in 2017. That’s not all – another piece of tech seen hitherto in smartphones by the likes of Samsung (and many others) now makes its iPhone-debut.

OLED panels are seen on Apple-made phone for the first time, ensuring that the all-display front of this iPhone X really catches your eye. At the launch event, Apple said it believes OLED technologies is finally at a place where it is in a position to provide brightness levels, wide color service, and color accuracy that the business desires. In terms of performance, the iPhone X display is as good as we have seen on any smartphone.

The price that you purchase this all-display front is with the loss of the iconic home button and the embedded Touch ID sensor, which are fundamental to the way we interact with our iPhones since their respective introductions. Instead, you get Face ID, which is enabled thanks to a range of detectors in that notch we spoke about earlier. Thanks to a Dot Projector, an Infrared Camera, and a Flood Illuminator, the iPhone X is able to build a 3D model of your face, even in the dark. Apple says this signifies Face ID cannot be fooled using your picture, or even a face mask which would trick most humans.

Though we didn’t have to examine Face ID using our own face in the hands area at the Steve Jobs Theater on Tuesday, depending on the demos we saw following the case, this first-generation unlocking technique is definitely slower than Touch ID, which is hardly a surprise. A fairer comparison could be with face-unlocking implementations of different OEMs, and Face ID appears to ace that test. More when we put the iPhone X through the paces during our review though.

A fun new iPhone X feature that the TrueDepth camera program enables is named Animoji. This lets you send messages in which emojis can take your face and voice. While fun, it will be interesting to see if Animojis continue to be used once the novelty wears off. There are other software touches which are different about the iPhone X – you swipe up in the bottom edge to mimic the functionality of this house button; swipe and briefly hold to bring up the multi-tasking view; and slide down from the right of the top notch to bring the Control Center into view.

As you would expect, the iPhone X comes with a bunch of different enhancements: improved cameras with Quad-LED True Tone flash to the rear, the A11 Bionic SoC that’s the fastest-ever smartphone chip on newspaper, stereo speakers, water and dust resistance, wireless charging, and a whole lot more which we will test in detail over the next few days. Stay tuned to Gadgets 360 to get a review of the iPhone X.